Welcome back! As I mentioned in the last post, painting the Dwarf Warrior proved a little more difficult than originally anticipated. The culprit: indecisiveness. Sometimes being an artist means we allow ourselves to flood our brains with too many options. For example, should I color this in a comic book style, maybe manga style, maybe realistic style, oil painted style...I think you get it by now. I have yet to meet an artist who hasn't explored a myriad of techniques and styles of art. It is who we are, visual storytellers and sometimes the tools and techniques change, depending on the mood we're trying to convey. Many times the mood changed based on how we ourselves feel. I created some of my best comic book fight scenes while angry lol.

Another thing us artist types get in trouble with is our ability to let everything, and I mean everything, inspire us. Watch the movie 'Aliens' and now we want to draw something sci-fi inspired, watch 'Lord of the Rings' and the next thing ya know, we're painting dragons and um...Dwarf Warriors.

I have always had this problem, primarily when it comes to my own personal work. Granted, there's nothing wrong with having options in regards to tools, style and technique. But we need to reign those impulses in once we decide to finally get to work.

Fortunately, when it comes to deadlines, I have the discipline of a Shaolin priest. Giving yourself a strict timeline to complete a project can go a long way to calm that wandering creative mind and help you complete the task at hand. Let your creativity lead you to awesome art but let the left side of your brain (the logical side) keep you on point so you get more done.

You like a challenge as an artist, don't you? I know I like to push myself. Well, drawing crumpled paper, with all of it's twists, folds, shadows, and subtleties, is likely to really give you a run for your money.

Like drawing really good hands, pulling off a nice drawing of crumpled paper can be a nice accomplishment in the road to being a better artist. Have fun!

Last week, I posted a video of me painting this Dwarf Warrior on the iPad. But the journey from point a to b on this particular character was not an easy one. You see, every once in a while an artist will have an idea for a character and then wind up stuck. I just could not get this sketch working for me. And it was even more difficult when it came time to paint it.

Original sketch of the Dwarf Warrior, drawn with mechanical pencil.

The point of all of this is, sometimes our ideas need more time to bake in the oven before they're ready for you to complete them. And so we need to learn to put those ideas aside and work on something else. Let those characters you want to create take their time, churning around in your brain, baking, cooking, bar-b-queing...until they tell you, 'hey man, I'm ready for my spotlight.

In the long run, I'm happy I decided to wait until this idea was ready. Next week I'll share how hard this was for me to paint lol. Art isn't as easy as non-creative people think. But I know I don't need to tell you guys that:) See you next week!

Boxes are our friends and sometimes our worst enemies. Most of us use or see boxes on a daily basis. They bring us books, clothes, toys, food when we order from our favorite online retailers.

But some boxes bring nasty surprises. Like the Lemarchand's puzzle box from Hellraiser movies. Oh, that box...it has such things to show you. Or perhaps the most famous box in the world, Pandora's box. Once you open that sucker up, well, it's not like a box of chocolates (see what I did there?).

The interesting thing about the packaging that makes up our boxes is the tiny details, the imperfections, dings, dents (oh, come on, you know you've received bent boxes and hoped your stuff wasn't busted inside)

For this next series of blog posts, I'm going to start with a video I did reviewing the Jot Touch with Pixelpoint by a company called Adonit. You'll get a time-lapse of me painting a fantasy warrior on the iPad Air 2. It's pretty cool stuff.

Next week, I'll take you to the beginning, starting off with the original sketch and move forward to the video you see here in the following weeks.

I hope you enjoy and share with your friends. Please follow me on my other social media joints using the links at the bottom of the page. Thanks!